The High Court has granted limited leave for a family’s judicial review challenge to an international protection decision, allowing two grounds to proceed while refusing leave on three others.
In an ex tempore decision delivered on 27 October 2023, Ms Justice Hyland considered whether the applicants had shown substantial grounds for seeking judicial review. She granted leave on reliefs 2 and 5, refused it on reliefs 1, 3 and 4, and did not determine the underlying challenge to the Tribunal decision.
Relief 2 seeks to quash the section 49 decisions or recommendations made in respect of the applicants on 14 April 2023, if the underlying Tribunal decision is quashed. The judge said this ground should remain in the case because she was allowing relief 5. Relief 5 challenges the failure to notify applicants in advance that an oral hearing would be refused. The judge noted that the same issue was being litigated in other cases and that whether a test case should proceed could be considered later.
The family’s protection claims arose from the first applicant’s account that he had been targeted after exposing a person to prosecution and imprisonment, and that he and his family faced risk from people acting on that person’s behalf. The International Protection Office rejected the account as lacking credibility. On appeal, the International Protection Appeals Tribunal accepted the account as credible but refused protection, concluding there was no link to a Refugee Convention ground. The applications had been joined by the Tribunal, and the family had not received oral hearings despite requests.
The applicants argued that the family members could constitute a particular social group and that the Tribunal had misunderstood whether the first-instance decision maker had assessed the Convention nexus. The judge found the submissions did not establish substantial grounds to challenge the Tribunal’s conclusion. Although she accepted that one sentence in the Tribunal decision was ambiguous, she said the applicants had not shown that the wording affected its assessment or result.
The applicants also argued that deciding the nexus issue for the first time on appeal deprived them of a fair procedure and an effective remedy, and that the case should return to the IPO with favourable credibility findings preserved. The judge said the applicants could anticipate that the Tribunal would consider nexus if it accepted the persecution claim, and found they had not shown substantial grounds for the fair-procedures argument. She also found no adequate legal basis for requiring the IPO to address every element of a protection claim after a negative finding on an earlier element, or for preserving favourable parts of the Tribunal’s decision while challenging other parts.
The decision grants permission to bring the specified grounds; it does not decide whether the judicial review challenge will ultimately succeed.